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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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The thing about all these "kids without parents" stories, is I mean, they aren't on their face unbelievable. Tragedy happens. But they'd be a lot more believable if it wasn't random twitter accounts, or photos of screenshots of text messages from some guy.

I wasn't 100% on board with the whole "FEMA is blocking aid" stories coming out until Elon Musk personally attested that an engineer on his payroll in North Carolina was being blocked. That is a concrete event with names we can verify. Would Elon lie about that? Or misunderstand or exaggerate? Maybe. But it's a starting point of a concrete claim that can be verified.

I have seen more videos of local sheriffs, helicopter pilots who'd been running rescue missions, etc coming forward and saying FEMA is blocking aid. Are these real sheriffs? Are these real pilots who really rescued a wife and then was blocked by FEMA from going back for the husband? Don't fucking know, but it's slightly better than "photo of a screenshot of a random text message".

I doubt I'll ever know how much of this was real and how much was fake. Especially since I'm already seeing the "It's all Russian misinformation" meme getting rolled out, and the precursors to "actually what caused excess deaths are all the people spreading misinformation". So fuck me I guess. We'll be arguing about how many died and who's fault it was until this passed out of living memory.

The temporary flight restriction Musk was complaining about is a matter of record, and it's the same one involved in the other incidents. You can argue about which Federal agency is responsible (the FAA issued it of course, but who asked for it is another matter), but there's no doubt it existed.

I have seen one report on X/Twitter of supplies being confiscated that was literally translated from the Russian. Not sure if Russian trolls or other trolls pretending to be Russian trolls.

The helicopter pilot being told he'd be arrested if he kept working was told that by a local fire chief, not FEMA.

Trigger warning: this is an infuriating story and the followup makes it quite a bit worse. https://youtube.com/watch?v=s8ICG0iaHqw

Any single "kid without parents" story has not been credible, just like any single "I saw a truck full of dead bodies" story is not credible. Dozens of seemingly independent stories make it more credible. I'm not 100% convinced that there is a naked kid survivor still tied to a tree, or what the maximal claim might be. I am pretty sure it is confirmed that this event has created some orphans, potentially stranding kids without any adult supervision entirely for hours, days, who knows if there's still a kid out there all alone? We wouldn't know, because they'd be alone. With communications down for so long, and people spread out in remote communities, no one can say they have the full grasp of the tragedy yet.

I am pretty convinced at this point that the death toll is in the thousands, and give 50% odds that this final death toll will not be on the official news until after the election. There are just too many reports of people saying they personally saw dead bodies, spread out across a wide geographical region.

I’ll take that bet.

Based on my friends and family in the area, I figured the death toll would stay under 500, possibly 300. This is a first-world country and there aren’t that many unaccounted for.

$100 to a charity of your choice if the official figure clears 1000 by the end of the year?

I would strongly encourage you to define what 'official figure' means, before making that bet. An 'excess deaths' measurement like used after Maria will give drastically higher results than those marked as storm-related by a coroner.

@OracleOutlook, what say you? I get the impression we’re both talking about coroner-marked deaths, i.e. drownings, contaminated water, or injuries. Is there a site we can agree on?

Would you like to use https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2024&basin=atl when the report becomes available?

Agreed.

  • 72 direct and 87 indirect for Sandy
  • 520 direct, 565 indirect, 307 indeterminate for Katrina
  • 66 direct, 90 other for Ian

Those appear to cover dehydration, hypothermia, car accidents, etc. but not “excess mortality.” So unless they’ve changed their methodology in the last few years, I’m good with it.

Sounds good. As far as bets go, it sounds like I win either way. Either I win the dubious honor of being able to read the tea leaves Twitter vibes, or I win fewer people dying in reality.

Make it a hurricane survivor charity for better symbolism?

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